Keith Woodward

The politics of autonomous space

This paper offers a further exploration of ‘flat ontology’, an account of the world that takes the immanence of localized, material process to be fundamentally different from and ontologically prior to transcendent, structured, and formal treatments of space. Our previous work in this area aimed at developing the concept of the site – via site ontology – as an ‘event-space’ that describes the differential contours and pressures of aggregating and dispersing bodies. This paper’s contribution lies in considering how politics and political potentials are specified by such event-spaces. In geography and other fields, politics has nearly always been thought to proceed from and to exist for subjects, regardless of how they get theorized. Here we explore how the site might initiate politics that neither presuppose nor undergird individual subject positionalities or mass identitarian categories. We argue that subjectivity – widely understood to be the motive force in organizing politics – is often ‘suspended’ where bodies encounter or get enlisted in the unanticipated connections and relations that site ontology describes. Thus, our account understands the site as autonomous with respect to the subject in two crucial ways. The site is: (1) organizationally autonomous: its rules emerge from its specific, localized relations and this material immanence makes the site the legislator of its own assembly; and (2) politically autonomous: that is, not conditioned by the political schemata of subjectivity per se, even though sites diversely and differently enlist and reshuffle bodies that often attend to, direct, participate in, and inhabit subjective politics.

Flattening Ontologies of Globalization: The Nollywood Case

In this article we offer some criticisms regarding the spatial ontologies that have underwritten theories of globalization. We evaluate different approaches to understanding their workings, each of which must grapple with the problem of connecting the local and the global, and contrast these to that of our recent work aimed at elaborating a ‘flat ontology’. The central feature of this alternative ontology is the site: a material localization characterized by differential relations through which one site is connected to other sites, out of which emerges a social space that can be understood to extend, however unevenly and temporarily, across distant places. Yet, in light of its focus on practices—on situated sayings and doings—our ontology must refuse the spatial imaginaries that underpin nearly all discussions of globalization. To illustrate our position we examine the practices of popular filmmaking within Lagos, Nigeria (Nollywood). This site is an entry point for comprehending and enlarging upon the political implications of our ontology—one that is meant not only to rethink globalization but to unsettle the abstractions that enable its expanding hegemony.

One Sinister Hurricane: Simondon and Collaborative Visualization

This article offers a theory and methodology for understanding and interpreting collaborations that involve visualization technologies. The collaboration discussed here is technically a geovisualization—an immersive, digital “fulldome” film of Hurricane Katrina developed by the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, produced in collaboration with atmospheric scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. The project, which brought together AVLs programmers, visualization experts, and artists with NCARs scientists, required the integration of diverse disciplinary perspectives. In the language of such collaborations, the term renaissance team was coined to capture the collective expertise necessary to produce modern, high-end visualizations of large data sets. In this article, we deploy Simondons concepts of technical objects and collective individuation to analyze the development of AVLs Katrina simulation. One extended sequence of team member collaboration suggests that technical objects also be treated as “collaborators,” for they have the capacity to transform such collectives through the unique problems they present.

Impracticality and critique in a problematic field

Here I discuss how Guattari’s ‘impracticality,’ as Gerlach and Jellis put it, harbours rich models for political and theoretical practice. I describe these in terms of Guattari’s participation in militant activism and anti-psychiatric organizations, as well as his cross-disciplinary theoretical engagements, all of which exemplify nuanced navigations of ‘problematic fields’. After surveying what these are and how they work in Guattarian philosophy, I briefly engage Gerlach and Jellis’s dismissal of certain tendencies within geographic theory.

Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies

Post-structuralism is an intellectual movement that emerged in philosophy and the humanities in the 1960s and 1970s. It challenged the tenets of structuralism, which had previously held sway over the interpretation of language and texts in the humanities and the study of economies and cultures in the social sciences. Post-structuralists critiqued structuralisms reliance on centers and binary oppositions; they questioned the soundness of ontology and demonstrated the emergence of Truth regimes; and they developed new ways of thinking about difference and identity that are anti-essentialist rather than grounded or fixed a priori. Post-structuralism has been criticized for being idealist and apolitical and for lacking evaluative standards, charges that most post-structuralists reject or reinterpret. In regard to geography, the movements impact has been largest in cultural geography, where it has led to new perspectives on landscapes, representation, and identity. However, it also has adherents in political geography, economic geography, and social geography. Much of its de-stabilizing force within the discipline has revolved around antagonisms between it and other geographic approaches, especially spatial science, critical realism and Marxism, and humanistic geography. Here, we first elaborate the tenets of structuralism and post-structuralism, dividing the latter into theorists whose work alternatively stress epistemology and ontology. We then go on to discuss some of the more influential aspects of post-structuralist geography. In doing so, we argue that a geographical sensibility, that is, an alertness to space, space–time contexts, historicogeographical specificities and so on, should be considered part and parcel of postdisciplinary, post-structural theorizing, research, and politics.

Downsizing Wal-Mart: A Reply to Prytherch

We are grateful to the editors of Urban Geography for inviting us to respond to the recent article by David Prytherch (2007), “Urban Geography With Scale: Rethinking Scale Via Wal-Mart’s Geography of Big Things.” In his essay, Prytherch criticized our article, “Human Geography Without Scale” (Marston et al., 2005), in which we argued that scale is an irredeemably chaotic concept, one more suggestive of a pervasive hierarchical epistemology—wherein geographers sort and analogize sociospatial processes through “levels”—than an ontological effort to think through the material-spatiality of processes, events, and orders. Together with us, Prytherch is ready to reject poorly conceived hierarchies that transcendentalize sociospatial processes by tossing them onto orders higher than the state of affairs would suggest. Yet he is not, in his words, ready to throw out the concept with the “dirty epistemological bathwater” (p. 461). Instead, Prytherch attempts to recoup scale by arguing that it is a proportional or relative concept; that it should be understood as a volumetric, networked, space of flows; and that urban (more so than political or economic) geography can provide unique insights into what scale is and how it is structured and works. He goes on to illustrate his case for the scalar geography of “big things” by describing some of the flows and coordinations necessary to fill a 200,000-plus square foot Wal-Mart Supercenter in West Phoenix, Arizona. In this reply, we want to accomplish three things: (1) briefly summarize our position with respect to scale (see also our reply to critics in Jones et al., 2007); (2) examine what we believe are flaws in Prytherch’s effort to rethink and thereby recover scale for urban geography 2 ; and (3) suggest where to start in a different approach to reading a phenomenon such as Wal-Mart.

The speculative geography of Orson Welles

Orson Welles’ experimental ‘essay film’, F for Fake (1973), captures in short form what the prodigious director’s life expressed in grander gestures: a speculative geography for an accident-prone cinema. Documenting the fakery techniques of famed 20th-century art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, the film has been widely read as a showcase of Welles’ own ‘charlatanism’. Indeed, even Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema claims that the ubiquitous Wellesian ‘character’ – the forger, the faker, the double-dealer – culminates in F for Fake. But, along with Welles’ other late-life essay films, it also offers a pragmatic strategy for theorizing the sites of cinematic production on the basis of their constituent contingencies. For Welles the independent filmmaker, these uncertainties unfailingly manifested in financial, technological, and geographical disasters – problems that, I argue, he harnessed to cultivate a unique cinematic ‘style’. The resulting ‘Wellesian continuum’ illuminates the conspiracy of perception, thoughts, and accident in the production of cinematic space. Offering ‘how to’ guide on forging series from the contingencies of production, Welles’ meditation on fakery models the creation of such sites and lays out the conceptual architecture for theorizing their cinematic production. Welles’ resulting ontology of cinematic seriality describes technical problematics – ‘anti-techniques’ – that give rise to speculative geographies.

Translating affectAndersonBen, Encountering Affect Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions. New York: Routledge, 2016; 208 pp: 9781138248489, £37.99 (pbk).

of total war, the versions of ‘debility, dependency, dread’ as an identifiable affective state that became an object target in techniques of interrogation. It would be interesting to extend this through exploring the movement of affect between atmospheric spaces: How the technologies that produce particular forms of affective life have knock-on effects that may not be immediately visible when one focuses only on one set of articulations. To me, one of the most exciting aspects of thinking about affect in the service of critique is in its making visible the ‘bleeding’ of material effects into different spaces. This can draw our attention to the knock-on effects of macro-level change, for example, ‘austerity’ measures or deindustrialization. Intensities can translate and redirect: The frustrations that emerge from an intensification and precaritization of work, for example, might make themselves known and felt differently through domestic and other spaces. If we look for one formation of affective life, across different spaces and scales, we may miss the way in which the flows of intensities produced might actually turn into something quite different, and as a result go unnoticed. So while the genealogical tracing of versions of affective life is absolutely critical to understanding affect, I wonder too if we need to develop ways of paying attention to these translations and picking at those histories that produce the possibility and substance of encounters or atmospheres. This book both contributes to and highlights the needs for new methodological approaches and techniques for sensitizing ourselves to the production – and movement – of forms of affective life. The three framings in this volume will no doubt prove incredibly useful for thinking about how we might investigate and develop methodologies that attend to such forms.

Mediated Geographies Across Arizona: Learning Literacy Skills Through Filmmaking

This chapter explores the project Mediated Geographies: Critical Pedagogy and Geographic Education, which combined the geography departments from the three Universities in Arizona (Northern Arizona State University, Arizona State University, and the University of Arizona). In the pedagogical project we encouraged students to both critically evaluate the vast amount of visual information in their daily lives and become literate in technologies related to digital media. Our four goals were as follows: (1) create a series of integrated geography courses across three universities; (2) have students work in groups on semester-long projects to produce digital video documentaries or multi-media photo essays; (3) use learner-centered education principles combined with critical pedagogy to enhance geographic media literacy within the courses; and (4) have students communicate what they learned to fellow students in a formal, conference setting. Elsewhere, we examine how critical pedagogy and learner-centered education strategies were used to engage students in these projects and how students communicated what they learned in a conference setting (Lukinbeal et al. 2007). In this paper we first review the student documentaries that were created and offer web links to these productions, before turning to our assessment of students’ geographic media literacy skills. We conclude by noting the problems, difficulties, and successes of our project and by making suggestions on how to better assess and implement geographic media literacy skills in pedagogic practice.